


i^ 



LIBRARY OF COiaRESS. 



P.RBSBNTED BY- 
UNITED STATES ,0P AMERICA. 



> 



LETTER 



OF 



HORACE GREELEY 



To Messrs. GEO. W. BLUNT, JOHN A. KENNEDY, JOHN 

O. STONE, STEPHEN HYATT, and 30 others, 

Members of the Union League Club. 







M 



PRIVATELY PRINTED 

1867. 



■, V 



^ 



a^ Gr^°' 






By these Presents, Greeting ! 



To Messrs. Geo. W. Blunt, John A. Kennedy, John O. 
Stone, Stephen Hyatt, and 30 others^ members of the 
Union League Club. 



Gentlemen : I was favored on the 
1 6th inst., by an official note from our 
ever-courteous President, John Jay, noti- 
fying me that a requisition had been pre- 
sented to him for " a special meeting of 
" the Club, at an early day, for the pur- 
" pose of taking into consideration the 
" conduct of Horace Greeley, a member 
" of the Club, who has become a bonds- 
" man for Jefferson Davis, late chief officer 
" of the Rebel Government." Mr. Jay 
continues : 

" As I have reason to believe that the signers, or some of 
them, disapprove of the conduct which they propose the Club 
shall consider, it is clearly due, both to the Club and to yourself, 
that you should have the opportunity of being heard on the sub- 

I 



ject ; I beg, therefore, to ask on what evening it will be con- 
vfenient for you that I call the meeting," &c., &c. 

In my prompt reply, I requested the 
President to give you reasonable time for 
reflection, but assured him that / wanted 
none; since I should not attend the meet- 
ing, nor ask any friend to do so, and 
should make no defense, nor offer aught 
in the way of self-vindication. I am sure 
my friends in the Club will not construe 
this as implying disrespect \ but it is not 
my habit to take part in any discussions 
which may arise among other gentlemen 
as to my fitness to enjoy their society. 
That is their affair altogether, and to them 
I leave it. 

The single point whereon I have any 
occasion or wish to address you is your 
virtual implication that there is something 
novel, unexpected, astounding, in my con- 
duct in the matter suggested by you as 
the basis of your action. I choose not to 
rest under this assumption, but to prove 



that you, being persons of ordinary intelli- 
gence, must know better. On this point, 
I cite you to a scrutiny of the record: 

The surrender of Gen. Lee was made 
known in this city at 1 1 p. m. of Sunday, 
April 9th, 1865, and fitly announced in 
The Tribune of next morning, April loth. 
On that very day^ I wrote, and next morn- 
ing printed in these columns, a leader 
entitled '' Magnanimity in Triumph," 
wherein I said : 

" We hear men say : — ' Yes, forgive the great mass of those 
who have been misled into rebellion, but punish the leaders as 
they deserve.' But who can accurately draw the line between 
leaders and followers in the premises ? By what test shall they 
be discriminated ? -^ * * Where is your touchstone of lead- 
ership ? We know of none. 

Nor can we agree with those who would punish the original 
plotters of Secession, yet spare their ultimate and scarcely will- 
ing converts. On the contrary, while we would revive or inflame 
resentment against none of them, we feel far less antipathy to 
the original upholders of the 'resolutions of '98' — to the disci- 
ples of Calhoun and McDuffie — to the Nullifiers of 1832, and 
the 'State Rights' men of 1850 — than to the John Bells, Hum- 
phrey Marshalls, and Alex. H. H. Stuarts, who were schooled in 
the National faith, and who, in becoming Disunionists and Reb- 
els, trampled on the professions of a lifetime, and spurned the 
logic wherewith they had so often unanswerably demonstrated 



that Secession was treason. * * * We consider Jefferson 
Davis this day a less culpable traitor than John Bell. 

" But we cannot believe it wise or well to take the life of any 
man who shall have submitted to the National authority. The 
execution of even one such would be felt as a personal stigma by 
every one who had ever aided the Rebel cause. Each would say 
to himself, ' I am as culpable as he ; we differ only in that I am 
deemed of comparatively little consequence.' A single Con- 
federate led out to execution would be evermore enshrined in a 
million hearts as a conspicuous hero and martyr. We cannot 
reaUze that it would be wholesome or safe — we are sure it would 
not be magnanimous — to give the overpowered disloyalty of the 
South such a shrine. Would the throne of the House of Han- 
over stand more firmly had Charles Edward been caught and 
executed after Culloden ? Is Austrian domination in Hungary 
more stable to-day for the hanging of Nagy Sandor and his 
twelve compatriots after the surrender of Vilagos ? 

" We plead against passions certain to be at this moment 
fierce and intolerant ; but on our side are the Ages and the voice 
of History. We plead for a restoration of the Union, against a 
policy which would afford a momentary gratification at the cost 
of years of perilous hate and bitterness. ******* 

" Those who invoke Military execution for the vanquished, 
or even for their leaders, we suspect will not generally be found 
among the few who have long been exposed to unjust odium as 
haters of the South, because they abhorred Slavery. And, as to 
the long-oppressed and degraded Blacks — so lately the slaves, 
destined still to be the neighbors, and (we trust) at no distant 
day, the fellow-citizens, of the Southern Whites — we are sure 
that their voice, could it be authentically uttered, would ring out 
decidedly, sonorously, on the side of Clemency — of Humanity." 

On the next day, I had some more in 



this spirit, and on the 13 th an elaborate 
leader, entitled " Peace — Punishment," in 
the course of which I said : 



" The New-Tor k Times, doing injustice to its own sagacity in 
a characteristic attempt to sail between wind and water, says : 
' Let us hang JefF. Davis, and spare the rest.' * * * We 
do not concur in the advice. Davis did not devise nor instigate 
the Rebellion ; on the contrary, he was one of the latest and most 
reluctant of the notables of the Cotton States to renounce defini- 
tively the Union. His prominence is purely official and repre- 
sentative : the only reason for hanging him is that you therein 
condemn and stigmatize more persons than in hanging any one 
else. There is not an ex-Rebel in the world — no matter how 
penitent — who will not have unpleasant sensations about the neck 
on the day when the Confederate President is to be hung. And 
to what good end ? 

" We insist that this matter must not be regarded in any nar- 
row aspect. We are most anxious to secure the assent of the 
South to Emancipation ; not that assent which the condemned 
gives to being hung when he shakes hands with his jailer and 
thanks him for past acts of kindness ; but that hearty assent 
which can only be won by magnanimity. Perhaps the Rebels, 
as a body, would have given, even one year ago, as large and as 
hearty a vote for hanging the writer of this article as any other 
man living; hence, it more especially seems to him important 
to prove that the Civilization based on Free Labor is of a higher 
and humaner type than that based on Slavery. We cannot real- 
ize that the gratification to enure to our friends from the hanging 
of any one man, or fifty men, should be allowed to outweigh this 
consideration." 



On the following day, I wrote again : 

* * ■» ^ cc \Yg entreat the President promptly to do and 
dare in the cause of magnanimity. The Southern mind is now 
open to kindness, and may be magnetically affected by generosity. 
Let assurance at once be given that there is to be a General Am- 
nesty and no general Confiscation. This is none the less the 
dictate of wisdom, because it is also the dictate of mercy. What 
we ask is, that the President say in effect, 'Slavery having, 
through rebellion, committed suicide, let the North and the South 
unite to bury the carcass, and then clasp hands across the 
grave.' " 

— The evening of that day witnessed 
that most appalling calamity, the murder 
of President Lincoln, which seemed in an 
instant to curdle all the milk of human 
kindness in Twenty Millions of American 
breasts. At once, insidious efforts were 
set on foot to turn the fury thus engender- 
ed against me, because of my pertinacious 
advocacy of mercy to the vanquished. 
Chancing to enter the club-house the 
next (Saturday) evening, I received a full 
broadside of your scowls, ere we listened 
to a clerical harangue intended to prove 
that Mr. Lincoln had been Providentially 



removed because of his notorious leanings 
towards clemency, in order to make way 
for a successor who would give the Rebels 
a full measure of stern justice. I was 
soon made to comprehend that I had no 
sympathizers — or none who dared seem 
such — in your crowded assemblage. And 
some maladroit admirer having, a few days 
afterward, made the Club a present of my 
portrait, its bare acceptance was resisted 
in a speech from the Chair by your then 
President — a speech whose vigorous in- 
vective was justified solely by my plead- 
ings for lenity to the Rebels. 

At once, a concerted howl of denuncia- 
tion and rage was sent up from every side 
against me by the little creatures whom 
God, for some inscrutable purpose, permits 
to edit a majority of our minor journals, 
echoed by a yell of " Stop my paper ! " 
from thousands of imperfectly instructed 
readers of The Tribune. One impudent 
puppy wrote me to answer categorically 



whether I was or was not in favor of hang- 
ing Jeff. Davis, adding that I must stop 
his paper if I were not ! Scores volun- 
teered assurances that I was defying public 
opinion — that most of my readers were 
against me — as if I could be induced to 
write what they wished said rather than 
what they needed to be told. I never 
before realized so vividly the baseness of 
the Editorial vocation according to the 
vulgar conception of it. The din raised 
about my ears now is nothing to that I 
then endured and despised. I am humil- 
iated by the reflection that it is (or was) 
in the power of such insects to annoy me, 
even by pretending to discover with sur- 
prise something that I have for years been 
publicly, emphatically proclaiming. 

— I must hurry over much that deserves 
a paragraph, to call your attention dis- 
tinctly to occurrences in November last. 
Upon the Republicans having, by despe- 
rate effort, handsomely carried our State 



against a formidable-looking combination 
of recent and venomous apostates with 
our natural adversaries, a cry arose from 
several quarters that I ought to be chosen 
U. S. Senator. At once, kind, discreet 
friends swarmed about me, whispering 
" only keep still about Universal Amnesty^ 
" and your election is certain. Just be 
" quiet a few weeks, and you can say what 
" you please thereafter. You have no 
" occasion to speak now." I slept on the 
well-meant suggestion, and deliberately 
concluded that I could not, in justice to 
myself, defer to it. I could not purchase 
office by even passive, negative dissimula- 
tion. No man should be enabled to say 
to me, in truth, " If I had supposed you 
" would persist in your rejected, condemn- 
" ed Amnesty hobby, I would not have 
" given you my vote." So I wrote and 
published, on the 27th of that month, my 
manifesto entitled " The True Bases of 
" Reconstruction," wherein, repelling the 



lO 



idea that I proposed a dicker with the ex- 
Rebels, I explicitly said : 

" I am for Universal Amnesty — so far as immunity from fear 
of punishment or confiscation is concerned — even though Impar- 
tial Suffrage should, for the present, be defeated. I did think it 
desirable that Jefferson Davis should be arraigned and tried for 
treason ; and it still seems to me that this might properly have 
been done many months ago. But it was not done then ; and 
now I believe it would result in far more evil than good. It 
would rekindle passions that have nearly burned out or been 
hushed to sleep ; it would fearfully convulse and agitate the 
South ; it would arrest the progress of reconciliation and kindly 
feeling there ; it would cost a large sum directly and a far larger 
indirectly ; and — unless the jury were scandalously packed — it 
would result in a non-agreement or no verdict. I can imagine 
no good end to be subserved by such a trial ; and — holding Davis 
neither better nor worse than several others — would have him 
treated as they are." 

Is it conceivable that men who can 
read, and who were made aware of this 
declaration — for most of you were present 
and shouted approval of Mr. Fessenden's 
condemnation of my views at the Club, 
two or three evenings thereafter — can now 
pretend that my aiding to have Davis bailed 
is something novel and unexpected ? 

— Gentlemen, I shall not attend your 



II 



meeting this evening. I have an engage- 
ment out of town, and shall keep it. I 
do not recognize you as capable of judg- 
ing, or even fully apprehending me. You 
evidently regard me as a v^eak sentiment- 
alist, misled by maudlin philosophy. I 
arraign you as narrow-minded blockheads, 
who would like to be useful to a great and 
good cause, but don't know how. Your 
attempt to base a great, enduring party on 
the hate and wrath necessarily engendered 
by a bloody Civil War, is as though you 
should plant a colony on an iceberg which 
had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. 
I tell you here, that out of a life earnestly 
devoted to the good of human kind, your 
children will select my going to Richmond 
and signing that bail-bond as the wisest 
act and will feel that it did more for 
Freedom and Humanity than all of you 
were competent to do, though you had 
lived to the age of Methuselah. 

I ask nothing of you, then, but that 



12 



you proceed to your end by a direct, 
frank, manly way. Don't sidle off into 
a mild resolution of censure, but move 
the expulsion which you purposed, and 
which I deserve if I deserve any reproach 
whatever. All I care for is, that you 
make this a square, stand-up fight, and 
record your judgment by Yeas and Nays. 
I care not how few vote with me, nor 
how many vote against me; for I know 
that the latter will repent it in dust and 
ashes before three years have passed. 
Understand, once for all, that I dare you 
and defy you, and that I propose to fight 
it out on the line that I have held from 
the day of Lee's surrender. So long as 
any man was seeking to overthrow our 
Government, he was my enemy ; from the 
hour in which he laid down his arms, he 
was my formerly erring countryman. So 
long as any is at heart opposed to the 
National unity, the Federal authority, or 
to that assertion of the Equal Rights of 



13 

All Men which has become practically 
identified with Loyalty and Nationality, 
I shall do my best to deprive him of 
power; but, whenever he ceases to be 
thus, I demand his restoration to all the 
privileges of American Citizenship. I 
give you fair notice that I shall urge the 
reenfranchisement of those now proscribed 
for Rebellion so soon as I shall feel con- 
fident that this course is consistent with 
the freedom of the Blacks and the unity 
of the Republic, and that I shall demand 
a recall of all now in exile only for parti- 
cipating in the Rebellion, whenever the 
country shall have been so thoroughly 
pacified that its safety will not thereby be 
endangered. And so, gentlemen, hoping 
that you will henceforth comprehend me 
somewhat better than you have done, I 
remain. Yours, 

Horace Greeley. 

New Torky May 23, 1867. 



